Siwa Oasis

The Siwa Oasis is an urban oasis in Egypt between the Qattara Depression and the Great Sand Sea in the Western Desert, located 30 miles east of the Libyan border and 348 miles from Cairo. The oasis was settled since the 9000s BC, and a necropolis was established in the 7th century, when Greek settlers from Cyrene first made contact with Siwa. Far removed from the center of Egypt, Siwa was isolated from the culture of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty and continued to hold the Nubian military order of the Medjay in high esteem even as the office became inconvenient to the Greek pharaohs. In 49 BC, Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII responded to Siwa's remote and disconnected nature by dispatching a garrison to Siwa, commanded by the oracle Medunamun. The garrison went from engaging in drunken brawls with the civilians to actively extorting tax money for the Pharaoh's royal army, publicly disciplining protesters, and summarily executing rebels and their families. Medunamun's reign of terror ended in 48 BC, when the medjay Bayek assassinated him and toppled Camp Shetjeh to the west, weakening Ptolemy's grip on the town. The town later adopted Christianity, resisting an Islamic army in 708 and resisting conversion until the 12th century. By then, it was inhabited mainly by Berbers, with an Arab minority. In 1819, the oasis was officially annexed to Egypt Eyalet. Siwans are still mostly Berbers, demographically and culturally linking them more to Libya than to Egypt. In 2016, the isolated settlement of Siwa had a population of 32,741 people, mostly Siwi-speaking Berbers.